“The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet’s ring system as seen from above and below the planet. ‘Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we’ve never seen before. It just doesn’t look like the same place. It’s so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.’ The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June.”

• Slashdot | Cassini Returns Amazing New Imagery from Saturn

Google has been at it again, and this time they are serving us mars on a silver plate! In cooler but similar fashion to their Google Moon. Special features include elevation map, infrared and (human) visible map.

In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, we’ve created some of the most detailed scientific maps of Mars ever made.

• Google Mars

ATP writes “CNN is reporting that a planet has been discovered in a solar system with 3 suns. The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun. The discovery also resulted in a new method of searching for extrasolar planets — until now most searching focused only on single-sun systems.”

Slashdot | Tatooine-like Planet Discovered

/. Fraser Cain writes “Astronomers have discovered a rocky, terrestrial planet orbiting a nearby star, Gliese 876. The planet has approximately 7.5 times the mass of the Earth, double its radius, and orbits its parent star once every two days. This is the most Earthlike extrasolar planet discovered so far.” Slashdot Reader Karthik Narayanaswami points out that “the planet was discovered by the famed Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy,” and adds a link to the news release from Berkeley.

* Slashdot | Rocky Planet Discovered